Good phonebook, the QWERTY saves a few clicks

The Nokia E6 comes with almost the same fully functional phonebook that Symbian^3 had to offer. There are a few cosmetic changes plus the new aspect, but that's pretty much everything. The phonebook can be synced with an Exchange ActiveSync account (Gmail offers that too), but as all the previous Symbian versions, the Anna will also cause some annoying problems here.

Symbian has been offering users virtually unlimited phonebook capacity and excellent contact management for quite some time but plus some social networking integration.

The E7 phonebook is pretty good

Contact details are displayed in two tabs. The first gives a summary of the contact info – a quick shortcut to call the primary number and then several lines, each of which groups similar info (e.g. tapping the “Message – 5 numbers” line lets you pick which number to send the message to). There is a shortcut to the Social Services app too.

The second tab just lists all available info sorted by type (names, phone numbers, email and so on). This tab isn't structured so it takes a bit more scrolling to find what you need.

Viewing a contact

Contacts can be freely ordered by first or last name. You can also set whether the contacts from the SIM card, the phone memory and the service numbers will get displayed.

Searching is very easy - just type something with the QWERTY keyboard and you are in. There is also alphabet scrolling in case you want to use the touchscreen.

Selecting some of your contacts as favorites moves them to the top of the displayed list. This saves you quite a lot of scrolling.

Marking a contact as favorite moves it on top of the list

Editing a contact offers a great variety of preset fields and you can replicate each of them as many times as you like.

You can assign personal ringtones and videos to individual contacts. If you prefer, you may group your contacts and give each group a specific ringtone.

Editing Dexter's details

A really nice touch when editing a contact’s details is the option to enter their address by locating it on a map.

The social network integration includes Facebook and Twitter, which should be fine for the vast majority of users. However you will need to go an extra step to check out your contact’s status and then another one to see their profile. We agree it might have created a mess if that was all added to the already lengthy phonebook profile but one of those extra steps is probably redundant.

Checking out the Dee Dee Facebook profile through the phonebook

Excellent telephony

Making and receiving calls is vital for a business phone and the Nokia E6 is a champ at it and we didn't experience any poor reception issues or dropped calls.

Smart dialing is available on the E6 and is practical as ever. You just punch in a few letters from the desired contact’s name and select it from the list that comes up to initiate a call.

Another option that the E6 offers is voice dialing. It’s activated by pressing and holding the call key or the dedicated Voice key in the middle of the volume rocker and is fully speaker-independent. As far as we can tell performs greatly, recognizing all the names we threw at it.

In noisier environments though, its effectiveness might suffer. Bear in mind too, that if you have multiple numbers assigned to a contact, the system will dial either the default number or the first in the list.

The final option for starting a call is via the Favorites widget on your homescreen.

Thanks to the proximity sensor the screen turns off automatically when you hold the phone next to your cheek during a call. The E6 also has the neat accelerometer-based feature that lets you mute the ringer by turning the phone face down.

The Nokia E6 sat our traditional loudspeaker test as well. Unfortunately, the phone managed only an Average result. More info on the test, as well as other results can be found here.

Speakerphone test

Voice, dB

Pink noise/ Music, dB

Ringing phone, dB

Overal score

Nokia E72

65.7

60.2

66.3

Below Average

Nokia E6

68.8

61.5

70.7

Average

Nokia E71

68.0

66.5

76.2

Good

Samsung Galaxy Pro B7510

69.6

72.0

81.9

Very Good

LG Optimus One P500

77.1

74.5

77.9

Excellent

A messaging expert

Nokia 6 is a business oriented smartphone and as such it’s all about messaging. The E6 has an excellent hardware QWERTY keyboard and will tackle all your messaging needs with ease.

The Nokia E6 messaging app • Conversation view

All your incoming messages arrive in a common inbox. If you like, you can also get them sorted as conversations, in threaded view. The Nokia E6 uses a common editor for all types of messages too.

Stuff like a character counter in SMS goes without saying.

Sending Dexter a message

Insert some multimedia content and the message is automatically transformed into an MMS. In that case, the character counter turns into a data counter showing kilobytes.

The Nokia E6 email client allowed us to setup our Gmail account quite easily, while getting it to sync with an Exchange ActiveSync server required some extra work (we explained that in our Phonebook section). In most cases though, all you need is to enter a username and a password and you will be good to go in no time.

Multiple email accounts and various security protocols are supported, so you can bet almost any mail service will run trouble-free on your Nokia E6.

Messages can be ordered by various criteria such as date, sender, subject, priority or even by attachments, searching is available as well.

The email client

The client can download headers only or entire messages, and can be set to automatically check mail at a given interval. You can set it to check only on given days and have it check more regularly than usual during peak time (which you can define).

There is also support for attachments, signatures and everything you would normally need on a mobile device.